Re: Emacs needs truely useful flex matching

[Stefan Monnier]

> Consider "fafbfcfd-bcd", your regexp will match "afbfcfd" from the first
> word, but we want to prefer "a" from the first word, "bcd" from the second
> word.

Duh!  Thanks for spelling it out.
So indeed you'd need regexps like

(re "ab...") = (concat "\\<a\\([^b]*\\)" (re "b...")
                       "\\|a\\([^b]*\\)" (re "b..."))

which blows up very quickly both in size and in matching time.

You can probably make it work with regexps, but it'll take more work:
- Match using the kind of regexp I suggested.  Use it to filter out
  uninteresting candidates.
- For those elements that match, try to match with stronger regexps
  to see if the match's value can be improved.  I.e. for "abcd", you'd
  first try "\\<a\\([^b]*\\)b\\([^c]*\\)c\\([^d]*\\)d", then
  either try "a\\([^b]*\\)\\<b\\([^c]*\\)c\\([^d]*\\)d" or
  try "\\<a\\([^b]*\\)\\<b\\([^c]*\\)c\\([^d]*\\)d" depending on the
  first test, etc...
  For an N-char key, that's O(N) regexp-matches, tho it may also turn out
  to require O(N) regexp-compilations, so it's probably OK but might
  require some extra work to optimize it further.

> Actually can I skip the GC somehow since I know I'm about to allocate a
> bunch of memory that never gets freed.

You can let-bound gc-cons-threshold, but I think it's not worth
the risk (the let-binding may apply to more code than expected in
situations such as debugging).


        Stefan